There are two main takeaways from the 2016 American presidential elections. First, the problem isn’t so much with the concept of liberalism or liberal values as it is with those who call themselves liberals and then do everything to undermine the ideology they claim to adhere. Second, the intolerance, even hatred, that the liberals display towards anyone who differs with them and who doesn’t agree with their airy-fairy, ivory-towered, elitist, cavalier, sometimes even anarchist, worldview is an attribute common to the so-called liberals across the globe. One doesn’t really need to be enamoured of Donald Trump to point out the ungraciousness in defeat and astounding intolerance of the so-called liberals.

Except for the fact that in India the so-called liberals accepted the verdict of the people in the 2014 elections and didn’t take to the streets to protest the election result as is happening in the United States after Trump’s victory, all the other attitudes displayed and arguments made to undermine and delegitimise the Trump presidency are remarkably similar to the sort of campaigns carried out to question the legitimacy of Narendra Modi in India.

Take, for instance, the bit about Hillary Clinton being a nose ahead Trump in popular vote. Even though the US presidential election is decided on basis of an electoral college, which Trump won fair and square, the popular vote bogey is being used to question Trump’s victory, just as Modi’s legitimacy was questioned on basis of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) winning 31 percent of vote in the first-past-the-post system operating in India. None of those raising questions about BJP’s 31 per cent mandate ever questioned Manmohan Singh’s mandate to govern India even though in both 2004 and 2009, the Congress vote share was below 30 percent.

In the liberal scheme of things, the electoral system is kosher if the candidate they are backing wins, but the same system is broken if their opponent wins. In other words, if the result is not what they wanted then it is unjust and unacceptable and the goalposts must be changed. As far as the liberals are concerned, it is a perfectly liberal thing to do to call for the assassination of an elected President or Prime Minister, burn and vandalise public property to protest a defeat, wish and pray for the plane crash of a PM who you dislike and so on and so forth. Just as many self-proclaimed intellectuals in India threatened to leave the country if Modi won, so too in the case of Trump.

It is of course another matter that no one left India and it is unlikely that anyone will leave the US – Americans will certainly not settle in Mexico just as none of those who felt Modi unfairly portrayed Pakistan as an evil dump will ever want to settle there – but it betrays the illiberal mindset of the liberals.

Then there is the scaremongering which invariably involves drawing parallels with the Nazi party winning elections in Germany. This is the standard, if also dumbed down, reference point to demonise the object of liberals’ hate. Of course the so-called liberals have never really been able to explain what makes the Left so right and the Right so wrong, especially since Leftist icons like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, and yet the ideology they espoused is seen as progressive. It is also another matter that none of the doomsday predictions of the liberals ever come true, while all their fanciful notions about how the world functions inevitably crash on the rocks of reality. Even so, this fear-mongering and demonisation of their opponents by the liberals is relentless. The positions that both Modi and Trump took to further the interests of their own people and country on issues ranging from illegal migration to foreign policy were disparaged as xenophobic, communal, isolationist and nationalist – the last being a four letter word in liberal lexicon, which strangely enough, when thrown back at liberals by calling them anti-national, results in the usual litany of complaints of how there are being unfairly labelled.

The problem with the liberals is that their superciliousness, their hypocrisy and their double-standards has been called into question and exposed and is therefore no longer selling with substantial sections of the population in different countries. The so-called liberals are losing their monopoly over determining the discourse and narrative in different countries across the globe. What is worse from their point of view, the ingrained intellectual fascism, even intellectual terrorism, that the liberals have practised over the last few decades is now being challenged and even defeated. Until now, the liberals have been shoving their often radical views and reforms down most people’s throats even as they displayed pusillanimity before the more regressive and reactionary sections of society. For instance, civil society activists at the forefront of women’s rights, hum and haw when it comes to taking a clear position on something like triple talaq. Their opposition to demands for banning triple talaq isn’t based on the merits of the case but on the ‘sinister’ designs of Modi in supporting Muslim women fighting against this evil practise.

Eating beef or hosting beef parties is seen an act of defiance, dissent and a symbol of liberalism even though large sections of society find it offensive, but the same people who proudly declare their inalienable right to eat beef never seem to host a pork party in AMU or Jamia Milia or even that bastion of anarchism, Jawaharlal Nehru. It is almost as if the liberals have decided that eating beef is progressive while talking of pork is reactionary and communal!

They brazenly question the courts when they pass death sentence on a convicted terrorist like Yakub Memon, but then defend other accused terrorists by saying until the accused is convicted by the court he can’t be called a terrorist. They will go hysterical and blow out of proportion a local incident of violence involving people from two communities, but will put a muzzle on their mouth when two dozen schools are burnt down in Kashmir. They will go ballistic when a religious minority is targeted by the majority but maintain a studied silence when members of majority community are targeted by the religious minority; cartoons of the prophet are blasphemous but an obscure tradition in which Ram and Sita were seen as siblings or nude images of Hindu Goddesses were freedom of expression. Clearly, the list of the liberals’ excesses and their mindless political correctness is both long and egregious, and is now inviting a reaction.

While it is a no-brainer that the rights of minority communities need to be respected and protected, how come insulting the sentiments of the majority community, disregarding their political insecurities, ignoring their economic concerns and dismissing the social stresses is now par for the course? Whenever ordinary folk raised these issues, they were treated with contempt and arrogantly told that they didn’t know what was good for them, that the pseudo-liberal elite knew what was best for the people and they would decide how the country would be run. The domination of the pseudo-liberals in academia, media, and politics ensured that alternate views were suppressed, nay crushed.

The liberal mafia thought it could carry on regardless of the sentiments of the majority of people by at best paying lip-service to their concerns but ultimately forcing them to lump every provocation that was being hurled at them. In both the US and India, the liberal media was indulging in advocacy in the garb of analysis (this from a tweet by an American scholar Max Abrahms).

In a strange twist, liberals, who at one time represented dissent from the establishment, had themselves become the establishment, and those questioning them increasingly became representative of the anti-establishment and pro-reform platform. It is in this sense that the election of both Modi and Trump, instead of being the demise of democracy is actually a victory of democracy. But try telling that to the liberals and what you will get is an apoplectic response.

The fight is no longer between liberals and conservatives, or for that matter between the Right and Left; the fight now is between right and wrong, between reality of the world as it exists and fictional notions about how the real world works, and between honesty and hypocrisy. And if the elections in different parts of the world in the last couple of years are any indication, we know who is losing this fight. Unless liberalism can be rescued from the so-called liberals, it could well end up in the rubbish bin of history.

And that would be a tragedy because liberalism and liberal values have a role to play as a moral compass to keep both state and society on the moderate path, or what in the Indian context can be termed as both state and society operating within the bounds of Maryada.